Clair vs Flux CD

Clair vs Flux CD: What are the differences?

Developers describe Clair as "Open Source Vulnerability Analysis for your Containers". Clair is a container vulnerability analysis service by CoreOS. It provides the list of vulnerabilities that threaten each container and can sends notifications whenever new vulnerabilities that affect existing containers are released. On the other hand, Flux CD is detailed as "The GitOps operator for Kubernetes". It is a tool that automatically ensures that the state of your Kubernetes cluster matches the configuration you’ve supplied in Git. It uses an operator in the cluster to trigger deployments inside Kubernetes, which means that you don’t need a separate continuous delivery tool.

Clair and Flux CD belong to "Container Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Clair are:

• api defines how users interact with Clair and exposes a documented HTTP API.
• worker extracts useful informations from layers and store everything in the database.
• updater periodically updates Clair's vulnerability database from known vulnerability sources.

On the other hand, Flux CD provides the following key features:

• Describe the entire desired state of your system in Git. This includes apps, configuration, dashboards, monitoring, and everything else
• Use YAML to enforce conformance to the declared system. You don’t need to run kubectl because all changes go through Git. Use diffing tools to detect divergence between observed and desired state and receive notifications
• Everything is controlled through pull requests, which means no learning curve for new developers. Just use your standard PR process. Your Git history provides a sequence of transactions, allowing you to recover system state from any snapshot. Fix a production issue via pull request rather than making changes to the running system

Clair is an open source tool with 6.53K GitHub stars and 821 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Clair's open source repository on GitHub.